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Resources:
Search Engine Terminology What
is... (a search engine
glossary) Whether
you're optimizing your pages yourself or
discussing the process with search engine
professionals, an understanding of search
engines and positioning requires an
understanding of some basic terminology.
We've compiled a list of search engine and
promotion related terms to help, but if
you don't find what you're looking for
just contact us. Click
popularity: a measure of how often a
listing presented by a search engine is
clicked. Some search engines and
directories will rank a site higher on
their results pages if the site proves to
be popular among searchers. Cloaking:
also known as "stealth," involves serving
a specific page to each search engine
spider and a different one to human
visitors. In most cases, frowned upon by
search engines. Comment
tag: html code that describes or documents
content. Most search engines ignore the
content of comment tags. Directory:
directories are built from submissions
made by website owners, and generally
arrange site listings hierarchically.
Yahoo! is the best known
example. Doorway
page: a web page created solely to achieve
high ranking in search engines for
particular keywords, and perhaps for a
specific engine. Today's doorway pages
should contain valuable and useful content
related to your site, and be fully linked
to the site, and so are often referred to
as "information pages." Dynamic
html: web pages generated on demand by
data in databases or using similar
technology. Can create ranking problems
because a search engine's spider may not
retrieve relevant content. FFA
Site: A so-called "free for all links"
page, which is created for the sole
purpose of compiling links. Submission
software or companies that claim to submit
your site to hundreds or thousands of
"search engines" actually use these for
most of that number. FFA sites are
essentially worthless in terms of
generating traffic, and links from them
will count nothing towards your site's
link popularity. Basically, they're a
waste of time. Frames:
using frames allows the division of a
visible web page into separate scrolling
regions. Can cause both navigational and
ranking problems as search engine
content. Hit:
relating to a search engine, the number of
sites or pages that are returned in
response to a given query. Relating to
site traffic, a hit is counted each time
an individual file (document, image,
multimedia file, etc.) is served in
response to a visitor's
request. Informational
page: a content-filled web page created to
focus on particular keywords. Differs from
a "doorway page" in that is wholly
integrated into the site and is useful to
human visitors, while a traditional
"doorway page" is aimed only at search
engines. Invisible
text: using a font color the same or close
to the color of the background of a page,
in an attempt to allow the content to be
indexed by search engines while not being
visible to humans. To search engines, this
is spam. IP
delivery or IP-based delivery: the
technique of serving a particular page in
response to a page request from a specific
IP address. Used in cloaking; a search
engine is identified by the IP address it
is using, and a page customized for that
search engine is served. Keyword
density: the ratio of the number of
occurrences of a particular keyword or
phrase to the total number of words in a
page. One element of search engine
optimization. Link
popularity: essentially a measure of how
many other sites indexed by the same
search engine have links to your site.
Link popularity is essentially simply a
count of links to a particular site; see
also link analysis. Link
analysis: a measure of the quality and
relevance of the set of links pointing to
a given site; contrast with link
popularity. Link
Farms: sites created and maintained solely
for the purpose of constructing links
between member sites. Should be avoided as
a violation of most search engines'
policies; their use won't build your
site's link popularity, and may result in
a ranking penalty. META
refresh tag: automatically replaces the
current page with a different one within
the website, or possibly offsite. In
general, use of refresh tags is
discouraged or penalized by search
engines. META
tag: html tag in the header section of a
web page, intended to offer content to
search engines. Among them are the keyword
and description tags, but these days most
true search engines de-emphasize or
completely ignore META tags. Relevancy:
how closely related a particular page is
to the search term requested. Reputation:
related to link popularity, a page will
score highest for reputation when it is
linked to by pages from other sites which
themselves are highly ranked. Well-known
sites recognized as "authoritive" are
given high reputation scores on their own;
it's for this reason that a link to your
site from something like cnn.com would be
very valuable. Search
engine: one of the internet's searchable
databases of web pages, generally built by
using "spiders" to locate and read
pages. Search
engine marketing: encompasses several
forms of marketing products and services
on the internet through management of
information presented by search engines
and directories. Included are such
elements as site optimization, and the
purchase and placement of
advertisements. Search
engine optimization: the process of
developing web pages or web sites in such
a way as to achieve favorable placement in
search engines and directories. Search
engine positioning: the process of
managing a page or site's positioning in
the search engines. Selective
delivery: the technique answering
browser's page request with a specific
page selected via an automated process
based on some piece of information gained
from the browser. For example, reading the
browser's language setting may allow a
page in that language to be served.
Similar to IP-based delivery. SERP:
A "search engine results page," the page
of site listings that a search engine
returns in response to a user's entry of a
search query. Often used in discussion of
the way such a page is laid out, for
example: "Overture listings are the first
sites presented on Yahoo's
SERPs." Spam:
as it applies to search engines, any
attempt to submit or place deceptive
information, or to "trick" the search
engine into placing a page in an
inaccurate position. Spider:
a program that traverses the web,
following links from page to page. Also
called a robot. Stop
word: common words, or words considered by
search engines to be irrelevant, are left
out by search algorithms. Examples are
"and," "the," etc. Generally, a stop word
in a query is treated as a "wild card;"
that is, the returned results usually
won't be exactly the same as if the word
had been left out of the query
entirely. Theme:
a relatively recent change in search
engine ranking algorithms, theme-based
engines essentially try to determine what
a page is "about" and to compare it to
other pages that seem to be related to the
same topic and rank it highly for certain
keywords that are determined to be related
to that page theme. Word
stemming: a practice used to some search
engines in which searches will return
results for words based upon a particular
stem. For example, a search for "develop"
might return pages containing the words
"development" or "developer." Search
Engine
Resources
Search
Engine
Advertising
Copy
Editing
Pricing
Information
FAQ |
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